Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830, by Ellen Lockhart
| Autor: | Deirdre Loughridge |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journal of the American Musicological Society. 73:177-182 |
| ISSN: | 1547-3848 0003-0139 |
| DOI: | 10.1525/jams.2020.73.1.177 |
| Popis: | Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 , by Ellen Lockhart. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xi, 218 pp. Happening upon the title Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 , one might suppose that the book places music in a rather esoteric conceptual configuration that held cultural relevance only for the delimited place and time. Do not be so fooled. In this work of sensitive and imaginative scholarship, Ellen Lockhart demonstrates a previously unrecognized centrality of the animated statue—the stone human figure that comes to life—to the development of Western aesthetic thought and operatic practice. Deftly traversing a wide range of sources, Lockhart shows how the animated statue ties together a rich late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world of musical theater, aesthetic theory, nationhood fantasies, sciences of the body, and notions of self. From such starting materials as the Pygmalion myth, the commedia dell'arte tradition, and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac's Traite des sensations (with its thought experiment of a statue gaining one sense at a time), the animated statue became a “means of understanding the relation of human senses to the self and to the very matters and materials of the fine arts” (p. 10). Lockhart uses this discovery to make a vital contribution to a growing musicological literature that takes seriously the historicity of the senses and multimedial conditions of music, and to make the language of animation and plasticity newly available as a resource or topic for musicological inquiry. Though consisting … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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